SELF-PRESERVATION and sex in a primitive society made desperate and bestial by war are the raw materials out of which Kaneto Shindo has conjured up "Onibaba" ("The Demon"), which arrived at the Toho Cinema from Japan in the 1960's. But the talented writer-director, who earned his laurels with "The Island," that superb, wordless documentary feature, relies mainly on raw qualities that are neither new nor especially inventive to achieve his stark, occasionally shocking effects. Although his artistic integrity remains untarnished, his driven rustic principals are exotic, sometimes grotesque figures out of medieval Japan, to whom a Westerner finds it hard to relate.
Mr. Shindo sets a suspenseful, properly somber mood as his small cast moves through man-high reeds of the marshy countryside near Kyoto ravaged by unending civil wars of the 16th century. His focus is on a grim woman and her glum young daughter-in-law whose livelihood depends on the samurai and soldiers they kill and deposit in a dry well, and whose accoutrements they sell to a fence. This dark existence is interrupted when a deserter turns up with the cheerless news that the woman's son has been killed. His basic drives are, of course, for food, and lust for the now widowed daughter-in-law, a desire to which she soon responds with animal fervor.
Harassed by the thought that she cannot continue her murderous chores without her daughter-in-law's help as well as by a mounting passion for the deserterthe older woman uses a demon's mask taken from a disfigured samurai she has slain, to scare her daughter-in-law away from her nocturnal trysts. Since he is being both mysterious and tragic, Mr. Shindo's climax to his Gothic tale is a witches' blend of terror and death. It is not unfair to reveal that when the older woman meets a violent end, she is unmasked to show a face horribly mutilated, for ironic and strangely symbolic reasons, by that mask.
Mr. Shindo's symbolism, which undoubtedly is more of a treat to the Oriental than the Occidental eye and ear, may be oblique, but his approach to amour is direct. Not the man to indulge in excessive dialogue, he has his laconic principals' actions speak louder than any words, adequately translated by English subtitles. The lusty bouts between the robust and comely daughter-in-law, Jitsuko Yoshimura (she was seen previously as the teen-ager in the Japanese "The Insect Woman") and the ill-fated deserter, played in rough, gruff obvious style by Kei Sato, are as frank and torrid as any exposed in the recent past. As the mother-in-law, Nobuko Otawa, who also was starred in "The Island," makes an oddly appealing and tragically lone figure competing for and with men in a world of famine, immorality and destruction.
The director's brooding tale is abetted by Hiyomi Kuroda's cloudy, low-key photography and Hikaru Kuroda's properly weird background musical score. But despite Mr. Shindo's obvious striving for elemental, timeless drama, it is simply sex that is the most impressive of the hungers depicted here.
Mr. Shindo sets a suspenseful, properly somber mood as his small cast moves through man-high reeds of the marshy countryside near Kyoto ravaged by unending civil wars of the 16th century. His focus is on a grim woman and her glum young daughter-in-law whose livelihood depends on the samurai and soldiers they kill and deposit in a dry well, and whose accoutrements they sell to a fence. This dark existence is interrupted when a deserter turns up with the cheerless news that the woman's son has been killed. His basic drives are, of course, for food, and lust for the now widowed daughter-in-law, a desire to which she soon responds with animal fervor.
Harassed by the thought that she cannot continue her murderous chores without her daughter-in-law's help as well as by a mounting passion for the deserterthe older woman uses a demon's mask taken from a disfigured samurai she has slain, to scare her daughter-in-law away from her nocturnal trysts. Since he is being both mysterious and tragic, Mr. Shindo's climax to his Gothic tale is a witches' blend of terror and death. It is not unfair to reveal that when the older woman meets a violent end, she is unmasked to show a face horribly mutilated, for ironic and strangely symbolic reasons, by that mask.
Mr. Shindo's symbolism, which undoubtedly is more of a treat to the Oriental than the Occidental eye and ear, may be oblique, but his approach to amour is direct. Not the man to indulge in excessive dialogue, he has his laconic principals' actions speak louder than any words, adequately translated by English subtitles. The lusty bouts between the robust and comely daughter-in-law, Jitsuko Yoshimura (she was seen previously as the teen-ager in the Japanese "The Insect Woman") and the ill-fated deserter, played in rough, gruff obvious style by Kei Sato, are as frank and torrid as any exposed in the recent past. As the mother-in-law, Nobuko Otawa, who also was starred in "The Island," makes an oddly appealing and tragically lone figure competing for and with men in a world of famine, immorality and destruction.
The director's brooding tale is abetted by Hiyomi Kuroda's cloudy, low-key photography and Hikaru Kuroda's properly weird background musical score. But despite Mr. Shindo's obvious striving for elemental, timeless drama, it is simply sex that is the most impressive of the hungers depicted here.
